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Honesty and Ecommerce

There are thousands and thousands of products and services online that promise you the world and fail to deliver. While these aren’t precisely scams, they dance so close that they might as well be. The problem is that many amateur ecommerce owners think that their best marketing strategy is to promise things like riches and whatever else someone might need in order to entice them. While this may work for the first time around, when it flops, you not only lose that customer, but word of mouth gets around and you get labeled with the death mark of ecommerce: Scammer.

In order to avoid this, you have to practice honesty right from square one. Honesty and less money do not go hand in hand, despite what you may think; quite the opposite in fact. When you actually deliver what you promise, you not only get the return customers, but you get the word of mouth working for you as well. But how do you be an tell the truth in business?

First, don’t promise the world to your potential customers. If you are selling a method of making money online, don’t promise that the business will make your customers thousands, explicitly or implicitly. Instead, offer your product as a way to make money, but leave the dollar figures up to the person running it. If you’re selling a product of any kind, own up to what the product can do, why and how it does what it’s promising, but don’t promise anything over the top; you’ll lose customers savvy enough to see through you and get other people angry. In fact, the more honest information you give, the more the expert you look and this improves your credibility-which leads to more buyers.

Secondly, realize that you don’t control how much money you or anyone will make from any product. This is more important if you are selling a money making system; there is no way for you to predict how much you will make month to month, let alone someone you’ve never met before. This is another reason why you should never tell people that they can make thousands on your system; there is absolutely no guarantee of this no matter how wonderful your product is. Again, say something along the lines of your product teaching the users how to make money, not guaranteeing that they will.

Finally, be available if something does go wrong and own up to up. Someone may follow your product faithfully and bomb or use of your product may cause problems and they may ask you for help or get angry. Do your best to help your customer out and make sure to point out that not every product is going to work the same way for everyone. That’s just the way the business world is, online or off and you can’t get discouraged by it, but you also have to deal with the customer in a mature and professional manner. This makes you look more legitimate as a business owner.

Honesty and business may seem as though it shouldn’t run together and it often doesn’t. But there’s no reason why you can’t be truthful and run your business in a legitimate, fair, and even handed manner. You’ll gather more customers who are loyal to you doing this than you would if you fibbed or promised things you couldn’t deliver.